My Monticello

June 1, 2021

In Johnson's title novella, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings leads a group escaping white supremacist violence in Charlottesville and taking refuge in Jefferson's plantation home. Also included: "Control Negro," about a university professor carrying out an experiment about racism with his own son as subject, which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2018 by guest editor Roxane Gay and read by LeVar Burton as part of PRI's Selected Shorts series. A major debut collection; with a 250,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from August 9, 2021
Johnson wrestles with questions of racial identity, post-racial society, and the legacies of slavery in her masterly debut collection. The pitch-perfect opener, “Control Negro,” follows Cornelius, a Black history professor whose peers mistake him for a janitor and whom white students mock with racist jokes, prompting him to plot with a married Black graduate student to have a son together and give him opportunities equal to those of “Average Caucasian Males.” In the experiment, the “Control Negro” doesn’t learn the identity of his father, and Cornelius observes from a distance, hopeful his son will turn out better. Other stories reckon with institutionalized racism in schools (“Something Sweet on the Tongue”) and the collateral damage wrought by the trauma endured by immigrants prior to leaving their homelands (“King of Xandria”). The superb title novella is set in the near future in Charlottesville, Va., where the Unite the Right rally has cast a long shadow and white supremacists pillage the downtown area. A collective of BIPOC residents decamp to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, seeking refuge. There’s Da’Naisha Hemings Love; her white boyfriend, Knox; and her other largely Black and brown neighbors. Love and her grandmother, MaViolet, descend from the Jefferson-Sally Hemings lineage, and thus occupy a unique position in the group. The author’s riveting storytelling and skill at rendering complex characters yield rich social commentary on Monticello and Jefferson’s complex ideologies of freedom, justice, and liberty. This incandescent work speaks not just to the moment, but to history.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
This debut consists of six stories, beginning with the jarring opening of the satire "Control Negro," all featuring characters who unsteadily long for self-discovery and seek their place in a world that misunderstands them. Johnson mesmerizes the reader with the novella-length "My Monticello," in which a group of Charlottesville neighbors are run from their homes by violent white supremacists. Da'Naisha, a Black college student, helps them flee the angry mob and hide out at Thomas Jefferson's historic plantation home. Although Da'Naisha has been aware that she is a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemmings since childhood, she struggles with the complexity of her ancestors' history as well as her relationship with a white man. Da'Naisha's resilience overshadows the weariness of a world engulfed in racism and global warming, her grandmother's failing health, and the realization of a new pregnancy. The fate of the group is implied to be fatal as the white mob eventually closes in after nearly three weeks. This fiction collection is an astonishing display of craftsmanship and heart-tugging narratives. Johnson is a brilliant storyteller who gracefully reflects a clear mirror on a troubled America.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
Stories centered on racism and Virginia, anchored by a dystopian tale set in Thomas Jefferson's home. The title novella that closes Johnson's debut book is stellar and could easily stand on its own. Plainly inspired by the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Johnson imagines a near future in which an "unraveling" has forced some of the town's brown and Black residents to find safety on Jefferson's homestead. The narrator, a University of Virginia student named Da'Naisha, is a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings and used to have an internship on the Monticello grounds. She's well aware of the irony of taking cover on a former plantation, but she has more pressing issues: She's pregnant, uncertain of the father, and her grandmother is suffering from asthma but lacks medicine. In depicting Da'Naisha's attempts to organize her fellow refugees to fend off an impending attack from marauding racists, Johnson crafts a fine-grained character study that also harrowingly reveals how racist violence repeats. Not all of the remaining stories have the same force, but Johnson has a knack for irony and inventive conceits. "Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse" is a story in the form of a checklist, suggesting all the ways that pursuing a sense of security can be products of self-delusion ("Never mind the dark-skinned guard who wouldn't even let you in..."). And the opening "Control Negro" is narrated by a man who uses his son to study whether a Black man who's "otherwise equivalent to those broods of average American Caucasian males" could transcend racism. In a few taut pages, Johnson uses the setup to explore not just institutional racism, but fatherhood, fatalism, policing, and social engineering. "How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve?" the narrator asks, a question the story makes both slippery and plain as day. A sharp debut by a writer with wit and confidence.

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